Some Like It Red

Take "Some Like It Hot" and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, crush them under the boot-heel of the totalitarian state; add 80s songs, corny jokes, and explosions (of both the romantic and the literal kind) and you'll start to get the flavor of Some Like It Red.

Another shipwreck off the coast of Illyria brings ashore a fresh batch of castaways in need of disguises. Except its 1985, and the land once known as Illyria is now the Albanian Peoples Republic, so when a 3-woman cruise ship ensemble washes up and witnesses the secret police in action, they must disguise themselves to survive. And thats just the beginning of all the disguises, doubling, and deception.

Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh As Told By Mr. George Smith, Associate Curator for the British Museum (deceased)

by Gregory Peters*

presented by The Plagiarists

The story of humanity’s oldest story and the man who discovered it. An epic of ancient hubris, Victorian chauvinism, heroic journeys, mythical monsters, the meaning of life, the inevitability of death, archaeological politics, disgruntled gods, language barriers, the Great Flood, and the universality of human experience.

The Woman in Black

by Susan Hill; Adapted by Stephen Mallatrat

A lawyer, obsessed with a curse that he believes has been cast over him and his family by the specter of a woman in black, engages a skeptical young actor to help him tell his terrifying story and exorcise the fear that grips his soul. It all begins innocently enough, but then, as they reach further into his darkest memories, they find themselves caught up in a world of eerie marshes and moaning winds. Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious stage adaptation of Susan Hill's ghost story, a brilliantly successful study in atmosphere, illusion and controlled horror, has been running in London’s West End for more than 25 years.

Cast:Joe Feliciano as the ActorIan Maryfield as KippsBillie Rye Bryant as The Woman in Black

These Saints Will Burn - A Tale of Joan of Arc

by Robert Stewart

In these saints will burn, Joan of Arc’s familiar story is re-imagined as a world full of giant puppets, poetry, a talking crow, and a trio of saints who may be less benevolent than they appear as they work to secure Joan’s place in history. Equal parts farce, war epic, and tragedy, ridiculous and sublime, these saints will burn examines free will, myth-making, human nature, and the morality of violence.

The Living Canvas Rx

Living Canvas Rx gets its name from the symbol for prescription, which originated as an abbreviation of the Late Latin verb recipe, the imperative form of recipere "to take." All of us are drug users in some way. If you watch TV, every commercial break mentions at least once to ask your doctor if some medicine is right for you. The radio yammers about free trials and studies. We get fixes from the local drugstore, from basement gardens, or street corner entrepreneurs. We seek things that make us happy sex, religion, television, chocolate, marijuana, wine, cocaine. What does it mean that this is such a universal search? And what makes one person's medicine more socially acceptable than another's?

Cast:

Hope Barnes

Miles Benjamin Barrett

Katie Carnes

Laura Elleseg

Cassandra Hannan

Nicole Jordan

Isaac Samuelson

Ben Schlotfelt

Sarah Smith

Kelly Steik

Production team:

Lisa Adams and Jack Dugan Carpenter (co-directors)

Melissa Schlesinger (sound designer)

John Jacobsen (lighting designer)

Pete Guither (projections designer)

Miona Lee (movement consultant)

Kit Ryan (stage manager)

August 1 - 17, 2014

Photos by Pete Guither

WAR SONG

by Jessica Wright Buha*

Music by Mallory Nees

WAR SONG is a a music-and-poetry-suffused look at the broken promises of the American Civil War through the eyes of Sgt. Maj. Christian Fleetwood, scholar, father, and highly decorated veteran of the United States Colored Infantry.

In 1895 Baltimore, Christian Fleetwood makes the final touches on a speech defending the rights of African-Americans to serve in the military, to be given at the upcoming Cotton States Expo in Atlanta. But his wife, Sara, has bitter objections to his journey, so Fleetwood conjures up the spirits of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman to encourage him, as "storytellers, all--lovers of song, beauty, and the fight, all." But the discussions turn sour, and prejudices bubble to the surface, leaving Fleetwood to realize that sometimes words aren't enough, and sometimes plowshares must be hammered back into swords.

Written By Jessica Wright Buha*

From the works of Christian Fleetwood, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Susie King Taylor, and W.E.B Du Bois

Measure for Measure

by William Shakespeare

Justice, mortality, mercy, and the dichotomy between corruption and purity fuel this work, often called one of Shakespeare's problem plays. It was, and continues to be, classified as comedy, though its tone may defy those expectations.

Matryoshka

by Gregory Peters*

Matryoshka is 1,001 Nights as covered by 20th-century American pop culture: a manic gumbo of television, b-movies, and comic books, populated by gangsters, cops, super-scientists, zombies, demons, comedians, soldiers, hit men, detectives, femme fatales, fallen angels, knights, and wizards – all brought to life by a powerful ensemble of actresses… and one very terrifying man.

Featuring:Kara Davidson

Kristen T. King

Rachel Griesinger

Rachael Miller

Robert Montgomery

Mallory Nees

Angelica M. Roque

Jessica Saxvik*

Julia Stemper*

Lisa Tosti.

Production Team:

Jack Dugan Carpenter*, DirectorShauna Warren, Stage Management

Kit Ryan, Assistant Director

Erin Outson, Asst. Stage Management

John Jacobsen, Lighting Design

Lauren Angelopoulos, Prop & Scenic Design

Melissa Schlesinger*, Sound Designer

Emma Cullimore*, Costume Design

Orion Couling, Fight Choreographer

John Ofori. Technical Director

*denotes a Plagiarist

March 14 - April 13, 2013

Photos by Joe Mazza at BraveLux

Matryoshka Trailer

Video by Chad Brown

Figments

by Billy St. John

Rick Jacobs is a playwright with a wild imagination—perhaps too wild! As he attempts to overcome a massive case of writer's block, the audience sees four figments of his imagination play out the opening scene of his next murder mystery. He—and they—are interrupted by the arrival of his neighbor, Loni, with whom Rick is secretly, and helplessly, in love. The source of Rick's trouble with women, his domineering mother, arrives on the scene (along with her imagined double) carrying a burial urn with Mr. Jacobs' ashes inside...

Caesura: A Butchery

Caesura: A Butchery is a true mash-up of three millennia of drama and poetry, combining Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Voltaire's Le Mort du Caesar, and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral togetherwith pieces from King Lear, Macbeth, other Eliot poems, The Orestia, Yeats, and others. The result is a visceral, apocalyptic, and occasionally funny feast of language, imagery, and blood, exploring gender, class, ambition, demagoguery, revolution, the horror of violence and the inevitability of history.

October 5th – November 5th, 2011 at The RBP RorschachProduced by The Plagiarists

"There is artfulness in the thrillingly macabre, and director Jack Dugan Carpenter captures it nicely in this well-edited poetic piece…" – John Dalton, Centerstage Chicago

The Alchemist

Adapted from Ben Jonson by Gregory Peters

In Ben Jonson’s startlingly modern masterpiece of misanthropy, three drifters – a fake captain, a prostitute, and an alchemist (recently peeled off the street) work overtime to offer greedy and credulous marks their wildest dreams, and then some – for a price, of course – and get out of town with the loot before it all comes crashing down. Their schemes and double-crosses pile up, twist together, and collapse on themselves, as imaginary potions really explode, imaginary long-lost relations are reunited for the first time, an imaginary noble lady suffers an imaginary mental illness, and three imaginary Spanish counts try to marry the same real woman. The only sure bet is that there will be no honor among thieves.

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

Tragedy, betrayal, ambition, honor, ghosts, and violence fuel this, one of the Bard's most famous and quoted plays. This production was created in the "FREE WILL" program at ISU wherein the team only had $100 to bring the piece to life.

4:48 Psychosis

by Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane's final play takes the audience on a subjective journey through the mind of a woman with clinical depression. The title of the play derives from the time, 4:48 a.m., when Kane, in her depressed state, often woke.

The Mutants

by Robert Stewart

the mutants is the story of exploratory expedition to map the ocean floor, undertaken by the butler, son & hired sea captain of an industrial tycoon. as the action progresses & the voyage goes on, the sailors dive to the depths & discover an array of creatures (both outside the ship & w/in their own ranks.) they don’t all reach the end, but the ones that do are gone for good.